Foremost

Last week a Negress, Mrs. Mary McLeod Bethune, talked to the Women's City Club of New York. She talked about the members of her race who have migrated.

"In the North Negroes live in segregated districts . . . high rents, lack of sanitation, breaking down of family life. . . . When a Negro leaves the South he leaves his skill behind. He must take a job of a different kind . . . there is no cotton to pick in the North. . . . The bulk of the Negro population is still in the South . . . [they] must be tended at their source . . . 8,000,000 ... a staggering problem. . . ."

The neat women of the City Club listened with attention. Mrs. Bethune had been introduced to them as the "world's foremost Negro woman educator." They had been told of her life--how she was born in a log cabin on a rice farm, how with her husband and son she had moved, long before the boom, to Palatka, Fla., where she taught in school, and sang "with unusual effect" in churches. All the time she wanted to start a school of her own, a school to "make colored girls plain and decent." She began in a rented house with five girls. She got five dollars for singing at a festival and made the first payment on the site of her present Bethune-Cookman College, at that time a dump-pile. Her girls cleared away the rubbish to give the-workmen room. In 1905 the school was chartered. In 1914 Mrs. Bethune bought a farm to "teach the girls sense," and to raise vegetables for the table. By 1918 people had given enough money to build an auditorium. Later Governor Catts of Florida and Vice President Coolidge spoke at the dedication. A knowledge of these things added interest, for the clubwomen, to the competent, slow speech of Mrs. Bethune. And she further interested them because, with her big comfortable body, big lips, slow voice, wise eyes, she sprang from that type of Negress which made such superlative nurses for the sons of neat white women-- before these white women took up "social service."